User blog:Darks Lanfear/Remember to KISS or Have Pride in Work?
I have worked a variety of jobs in my lifetime, most of which were based in customer service and telephone work. One of our main concepts when trying to explain to customers why something was happening was to KISS it - Keep It Simple, Silly (or Stupid as they said in school, but businesses frown on that). It has been ingrained for as long as my business career has gone on that people want things that are simple, easy to understand, and can be given to them quickly so they can go on their way. KISS them goodbye, pretty much. As a writer, I have always been a bit of a perfectionist, and I strive for thoroughness. Yes, there will be some spelling errors, or some grammar errors even, but that is par for the course. I know I am not perfect, I never will be perfect, and I am okay with that, so long as I give my all in trying to convey what I mean and touch other people. I refuse to KISS when I write, because I don't think that the people taking the time to read the words on the page are simple-minded or stupid. I believe they are trying to learn something, to see a new point of view, and to better themselves by interacting with others. The issue that I run into is when I am writing something like, say, a wiki article. Normally I do research on what I am writing about, be it an extension or a methodology (with both categories seeming to be racing to decide which one will be my forte). I have been attending college full time while working full time for a few years now, and am used to doing research, finding information, and citing sources. I don't have any issue with that at all, since it is now second nature. In fact, researching does not seem to be an issue when I am working on extensions, because more often than not there is no additional information to what is on the page. In fact, some extensions have been ignored because my research has turned up nothing that I can use to flesh out the stub that the infobox alone creates. For a change of pace, I switched over to methodologies instead (I mentioned before these two categories were warring, right?) HabitRPG has Habit in the name, and is a site built around changing and improving habits. So I was shocked to find that The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Dr. Stephen R Covey did not have a page on the website. My job taught the 7 habits, my parents breathed the 7 habits, and yet on the habit website there was no mention that I could find of the 7 habits. I decided to fix that, and so created a page for the 7 habits. I think I was an idiot. Now don't get me wrong - the subject matter is not the issue. The issue is me. I want to write and be thorough, but I know these habits, and I know where the research is, so being thorough has turned into an ongoing project that has taken 3 days now (yes, I am actually taking a break from writing that to write this. Bad me, bad). I look at the article and I so want to KISS it...and I think I might hate myself if I tried to break it down into simple parts like that. I think I just really needed to write out what I felt. I think if I KISS it, I am not only scraping on my work, and therefore cannot be proud of it, but I am also doing a disservice to those who might read the page. It is one thing to improve existing pages and add bulk to them, but a whole different ballgame when creating it from scratch. I feel like I have been working on this for so long and still have so much to go, yet when I look at it I know the information is right and it might help someone out. So I guess the real question here is do I KISS it, or do I keep adding the information out there so it might be able to help someone? I don't know the answer to that, so I will follow my usual choice - thoroughness to the max. Category:Blog posts